Musings of a life without a car in California, well at least San Francisco Bay Area/Silicon Valley. Full of tips, observations and impact of automobiles on our lives.
Check out the links to the right for resources and tips for reducing car usage. Get Active! Start Moving on your own energy! You can contact me at carfreeincalifornia@mac.com

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Putting the Park into Park(ing)

DIg those Parentheses! The Wall Street Journal has a whimsical article on activists who on Sept. 21, set up little "parks" in public parking spots to highlight the difficulty in finding parking is causing needless amounts of gas and emissions to look for parking.

"Park(ing) Day" was started two years ago in San Francisco by an art collective to highlight the lack of public outdoor space, rolling out a fake lawn. IT's grown from an urban planning focus to an environmental one.

Parking day highlights one of the advantages of not driving, I remember when I was entirely dependent on my bike in my post about parking a bike is faster.

The other frustrating thing is the amount of dead space parking and zoning creates. The other day, I was running around my neighborhood where I live close to commerical as well as residential zoning. That in the evenings parking lots are dead zones unoccupied. We tend to move our selves from one zone to another in the states, where in Europe and Asia there is more mixing. This is a tenent of "New Urbanism" but imagine if a parking space was measured by the fraction of time it was used, instead of how much.